But Maguire does make a point of indicating that the witch - frightening for her power to use words to make things happen, we learn (and what of that wouldn't be frightening for any patriarchal society?) - was not hated and/or feared by all - that she even had allies and was respected by those who, after her murder at the hands of the feckless Dorothy, seem mildly interested in revenge. Yet those are all outsiders, marginal to society and suspicious to the civilized, the law-abiding, the religious - with whom Liir has taken up by the time he begins to criticize his mother. Mainstream society is not kind to mothers, we see.

Elphaba was apparently not affectionate, not kind, not nurturing, not self-sacrificing, not involved - not maternal, Liir concludes, wondering if that alone might prove that she's not his mother - and further, she had green skin and a biting wit and enjoyed studying her spell-book late into the night. All inappropriate characteristics for an ideal mother. All she asked of Liir, we learn, was to keep himself safe. That alone might define an ideal mother from my own feminist perspective, though.

The interesting thing is that - at least at this point in the story, about halfway through the book - Liir is an ideal American man: handsome, independent, reserved, somewhat intelligent, basically obedient, mildly ambitious. In fact, single mothers have a tendency to produce that type, I've found. They appreciate women because they've seen their contributions in a situation in which none of it can be appropriated to a man, and they know how to work and take care of themselves because they've had to.

The Oedipus complex, on the other hand, can only arise when there's a man in a heterosexual relationship with a boy's mother to give the boy someone of whom to be jealous. (Or, as Hegel would have it, someone to Desire in hopes of fulfilling the boy's homoerotic Desire for recognition from the man.) Otherwise, the boy actually has his mother all to himself, as society idealizes. Granted, single mothers often work, but that keeps them from becoming as dependent on their children as the Bad Mother myth suggests - and really, despite the mothers most often demonized, it's only the stay-at-home moms who actually end up hurting their children (probably because they have no way to escape their postpartum depression and/or the endless, mindless drudgery of caring for young children). It's sadly ironic in retrospect that Mrs. McCann was celebrated as undeserving of losing a daughter because she's a stay-at-home mom (see my earlier post on the subject) - and yet now it appears as though she killed her daughter herself at the time.

[first posted on my Gather.com page earlier today]

Monty Python member Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil is uncanny in its prediction of the present. It depicts a totalitarian society in which the incredibly invasive Bureau of Information Retrieval "never makes mistakes" in pursuing terrorist suspects - or just those "selected for questioning" - who the movie shows us are usually if not always citizens and usually if not always die or otherwise disappear, regardless of their guilt or even their true identities. The main character, Sam Lowry, initially seems to be more aware of the problems inherent in his world than later, as he begins to haplessly destroy his own life and the lives of those around him in selfish pursuit of Jill, who resembles the woman of his idealistic dreams - literally. In that he is clearly influenced by the classic movies that hypnotize most of the members of this society into compliance with their horrific government.

Meanwhile, his widowed mother, Ida, repeatedly tries to force her son into a relationship with her friend's ungainly daughter and into a promotion to Information Retrieval, neither of which he wants. She accomplishes the latter by "pulling strings," she says, but her power clearly comes to a large extent from her sexuality, even though her high-ranking husband is dead. She basically admits to sleeping around with at least one high-level government official, a man at least as young as her son, and her plastic surgeon, who ultimately makes her look so young that her son sees Jill's face instead of Ida's - and that's right after he makes love with Jill in his mother's bed (while she's wearing a blond wig that makes her look more like the damsel in distress of his dreams). "Don't call me that," Ida says, as Sam cries repeatedly, "Mother! Mother!" The obsession of, it seems, all matronly women in this society with plastic surgery and lingerie are meant to further illustrate the failures of this fictional world - but the trope that's used to do it, the Monster Mother (controlling, powerful, sexual, and self-absorbed) is nothing new. And the result - the destruction of her son and everyone connected with him - is common as well.

[Another interesting sidenote: Sam's boss at the beginning of the movie is named Kurtzmann. I was instantly reminded of Kurtz from Heart of Darkness - but I also feel as though I've encountered another character named after Kurtz in my movie-watching of the past couple of years. Anyone able to help me with that?]

The film, though reminiscent of other futuristic cautionary tales, such as Blade Runner, only partially succeeds, due, I suspect, at least to some extent to its perplexing inconsistencies in characterization. Those may be due to Gilliam's Monty Python roots: He sacrifices consistency for humor, but in consequence the plot suffers. Still, its prophetic qualities are fascinating. Of course, it was purportedly inspired by George Orwell's 1984, so that shouldn't be surprising either.

My source for some of these details was Wikipedia.

In my continuing self-assigned summer homework (which obviously I've run out of time to finish) to ascertain for myself 1) why feminist theorists would have criticized Hemingway's work and 2) whether his treatment of mothers would accord with that judgment against him, I recently read A Farewell to Arms (Scribner Classics 1997), the story of an American who serves as an officer responsible for the ambulance service in the Italian Army in World War I and falls in love with a British nurse. Incidentally, Hemingway himself served in the Red Cross at the Italian front in WWI, and he also fell in love with a nurse there, but she ultimately rejected him as too young for her (according to The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson, Cambridge UP, 1996, ix). I personally suspect that it is because his own life had that disappointment in it that the comparable relationship in A Farewell to Arms ends so regrettably. It was the real emotions from Hemingway's own experiences that, once he imbued them in his characters, gave those characters the life that makes them so real to his readers, who may have felt those same emotions without even realizing it. But he was also a product of his time, as we all are. His depictions of ideal masculinity and femininity, as well as his perspective on mothering, perfectly represent those of the culture of which he is a part - and also perpetuate them, which is probably why his work fell victim to feminist criticism. The gender expectations of modern America were problematic, so his early 20th century depictions of them were as well.

But his representations of mothering are less problematic, since even though the demonization of mothers dates back to the earliest written work in the English language (Beowulf), it probably had more to do with justifying the domination of women than it did targeting mothers themselves, since mother-blame in particular only dates back to WWII. The feminists who engaged in criticizing Hemingway, in fact, were more interested in enacting mother-blame than he was himself, as I already demonstrated in my earlier discussion of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

In the two novels mentioned above as well as The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway's protagonists are always brave and humble, and in Farewell and Bell along with one of his autobiographies (The Moveable Feast, discussed here), each has a potent sex drive (so that includes himself). Sometimes his men are decisive, but the rest of the time they go with the flow, reacting to life as it happens to them. They are neither always honest nor always loyal, respectful, or faithful, but they are usually honest with themselves. They are cerebral and astute and feel deeply. They protect their women from the truth and thus always remain at least a little aloof from them, only truly connecting with other men, which connection is more often than not understood rather than articulated. And of course, they're straight. That is the Hemingway ideal of a man.

The ideal woman for Hemingway is best described as devoted. She is loyal and faithful, of course, and wants to serve her man sexually and support him professionally however she can - and most of all, she tries to make as little trouble for him and cause him as little concern on her behalf as possible. She is unaware of the true ways of the world and wants to remain that way. When her man is happy, she is genuinely happy, or tries to be, with no separate concerns for herself. The problems with this characterization should be clear.

"No," I lied.

This time, Barkley appears to have believed him (99). There is Henry's idealized masculinity, protecting his woman from the truth. In response, Barkley promises to "do what you want and say what you want and then I'll be a great success, won't I? [...] What would you like me to do now that you're all ready?" Henry replies, "Come to the bed again," and so she does. "I want what you want. There isn't any me any more," she claims (100).

Later Barkley seems to diverge from that when she refuses to marry Henry after they become intimate, but her explanation is completely in line with seeking to cause him as little concern on her behalf as possible. He asks, "Then nothing worries you?" and she replies, "Only being sent away from you. You're my religion. You're all I've got. [...] Don't talk as though you had to make an honest woman of me, darling. I'm a very honest woman. You can't be ashamed of something if you're only happy and proud of it. [...] I won't ever leave you for some one else" (108). And she doesn't.

She does become pregnant, though, but she doesn't tell him for three months because, she says, "It doesn't worry me but I'm afraid to worry you." He admits once she reveals her secret that "I only worry about you," and she responds, "That's what you mustn't do. People have babies all the time. Everybody has babies. It's a natural thing. [...] I'll try and not make trouble for you. I know I've made trouble now. But haven't I been a good girl until now?" (128)

Barkley continues to express similar sentiments throughout the rest of the book (142,268). Even while she was giving birth she worried about being any trouble: "I so want to be a good wife and have this child without any foolishness. Please go and get some breakfast," she said (282). She sounds much like Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls who, for instance, is sore one night from previously repeatedly making love with protagonist Robert Jordan - to whom she's also unmarried because of the exigencies of wartime - but still asks him to make love with her because she only wants to be a good girl and make him happy. Neither situation may resemble Hemingway's true wartime romance, however, where the woman may have been the more experienced partner. As also demonstrated in my discussion of For Whom the Bell Tolls (linked above), his characters' situations don't always mirror his own.

Henry also displays his idealized masculinity when he resists an affectionate kiss from his philandering Italian surgeon roommate Rinaldi when Henry returns from battle wounded (66). When it happens again later, Rinaldi remarks, "I know, you are the fine good Anglo-Saxon boy. I know. You are the remorse boy, I know. I will wait till I see the Anglo-Saxon brushing away harlotry with a toothbrush," as he apparently always did after the men visited prostitutes the night before (155). Hemingway's ironic (because he's far from a saint himself) homophobia is always clear. Likewise, he demonstrates his racism when he has Henry use the epithet "wop" to describe Rinaldi (65) and then say of the Japanese that they "are a wonderful little people fond of dancing and light wines" (74); later, he adds, in conversation with Barkley, that "Othello was a nigger" (232).

When it comes down to it, the question is whether a writer deserves personal criticism for reflecting the problematic attitudes of his or her time in his or her work. I have previously discussed a work by a contemporary author in which he universally depicts women as untrustworthy; he defends that in the comments by essentially indicating that depicting is not endorsing. I have defended Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee the same way (but that's because she was an anthropologist and so had set out to do just that). Even Shakespeare was an anti-Semite, like most other Brits of his time.

Still, depicting is not only representing - it is also propagating. Satire is supposed to critique a trope by exaggerating it - but it also crystallizes it vividly for its audience, and stereotypes, as I discuss in most of my work, are powerful. Writing is a responsibility, and it takes vision to move forward rather than stagnate. Maybe I am right to judge.

In light of these considerations, the final moments of Farewell are the most interesting to me. Henry, when faced with the reality of the dangers of childbirth, cares nothing for his child being born and only for Barkley. "What reason is there for her to die?" he tries to reassure himself. "There's just a child that has to be born, the by-product of good nights in Milan. It makes trouble and is born and then you look after it and get fond of it maybe" (287). The doctor, who thinks that they are married, asks Henry's permission to perform a Caesarean, and they make a decision regardless of Barkley's wishes (288). When Henry finally sees the child, he thinks, "I had no feeling for him. He did not seem to have anything to do with me. I felt no feeling of fatherhood." He did not feel proud of him, he says, since "he nearly killed his mother." He didn't even want a boy, he says (291).

Then, as now, masculinity is not associated with loving children; men are instead socialized to be interested only in "good nights" and not in any of the consequences thereof. Idealized masculinity is supposed to represent awareness of the world and protecting women from that truth, but Henry was until the last in denial about the realities of childbirth, and he couldn't protect Barkley from them. It is the ultimate irony of our gender expectations that they so diverge from the truth in at least that one inescapable reality of our own physical creation. Had Barkley had the knowledge and ability to more reliably protect herself from conceiving in the first place, she could have been the untroublesome "wife" that she - and the world - wished her to be. But such power granted to a woman would simultaneously violate those ideals. And so all was lost.

I listened first to West's more recent Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, which probably first interested me because I've heard some criticism of West and wanted to discover for myself whether there was much basis for it. Democracy Matters struck me as odd in some ways for the directions that it took, starting with nihilism (which I later learned paralleled the organization of Race Matters, to which West constructed Democracy Matters as a sequel), spending a lot of time on religion (which is, I later realized, West's official field of study), and ending with his personal experiences with former Harvard President Leonard Summers (which I have to suspect that he included at least a little bit due to self-absorption). But besides that, I love West's work - or at least the written stuff. Perhaps the criticism that I've heard was mostly directed at West's musical creations, which I still have yet to experience myself. I'm working on that. This post, however, is about these two of his books.

The best things about West, in my opinion, are as follows:

1. He does not seem to exclude any important perspective, from a scholarly standpoint, while addressing his primary issues of race and religion. For a well-known (in academia, anyway) Black male professor to consistently recognize and discuss relevant issues of gender and sexual orientation, with his background at Harvard and now Princeton, is phenomenal, I assure you. Even in the supposedly liberal university, male theorists - particularly those of religion and/or race studies - are frequently opponents of women's and gay rights.

2. Even though he problematizes a lot of aspects of America today, he is not entirely doom-and-gloom. In fact, he seems far more proactive and optimistic - a wonderful thing for those of us who feel eternally buffeted by bad news these days. (That's why I recommended Democracy Matters to my mom before I even finished it.) I think that the most important point from Democracy Matters is one that he suggested early on: That those who would make the best leaders in this country don't want to run for office, and that those who do want to run for office are by and large far from ideal - or really even acceptable - candidates. It's true. As my husband says (although he got this idea from a liberal friend of ours first), anyone who aspires to an office is thereby unqualified to hold it. Both my husband and I ran for offices in our local Mensa chapter this summer, but we did so because we learned that there was a need for people like us to do so - not because we want to drive up to Phoenix once a month to wrangle over issues that would probably seem ridiculous to outsiders.

As West points out, in the early days of this country, the best and the brightest were groomed, more or less, for political positions, which they would ultimately take out of a sense of obligation rather than for any more ambitious purposes. That's why, for instance, elected offices are supposed to come with such poor salaries, as does the U.S. Presidency. But why don't more people in this country today see problems with it and then feel obligated to try to address them by running for public office? Why don't more of our bright high achievers take turns sharing their abilities with the people at large that way? West has inspired me to run for public office someday - which, like my ultimate degrees in English, my peers in high school predicted for me long before I ever thought such a thing possible - if only because I believe that I could do a good job, especially since I wouldn't see it as a career. I would run without being particularly desirous of getting re-elected so that I could do my job instead of worrying about keeping my job - so that I could reject corporate campaign funding if that would force me to feel an obligation to anyone besides my constituents and my country - so that I could be decisive without worrying about whom I might thereby make an enemy of. Or at least I plan to consider running someday. I've always felt that I was too outspoken and forthright to get elected to any office, though (even though of course those would be great characteristics once I was, I think).  But do you see how inspiring the book was?

After that I had to go back and read Race Matters, which I ought to have read professionally anyway, since race is one of my intellectual foci in my work. (I say that all the time, by the way. That's why my work is never done.) Some of West's best points in Race Matters (which, despite their incredible relevance today, as you'll see, was actually published in 1993):

• "Pleasure ... has little to do with the past and views the future as no more than a repetition of a hedonistically driven present. This market morality stigmatizes others as objects for personal pleasure or bodily stimulation. Conservative behaviorists have alleged that traditional morality has been undermined by radical feminists and the cultural radicals of the sixties. But it is clear that corporate market institutions have greatly contributed to undermining traditional morality in order to stay in business and make a profit. The reduction of individuals to objects of pleasure is especially evident in the culture industries--television, radio, video, music--in which gestures of sexual foreplay and orgiastic pleasure flood the marketplace.... These seductive images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others and thereby edge out nonmarket values--love, care, service to others--handed down by preceding generations. The predominance of this way of life among those living in poverty-ridden conditions, with a limited capacity to ward off self-contempt and self-hatred, results in the possible triumph of the nihilistic threat in black America" (17).

Note that West doesn't criticize the genres above themselves - for instance, he later points out that even though "listening to Motown records in the sixties or dancing to hip hop music in the nineties may not lead one to question the sexual myths of black women and men," at least "the Afro-Americanization of white youth--given the disproportionate black role in popular music and athletics--has put white kids in closer contact with their own bodies and facilitated more humane interaction with black people" (84)* - but the industries that exclusively favor, say, the oversexualized version of hip hop over the more politically aware kind which inspired it - and which still exists. That "market morality" can also be seen in our society's vast indifference to those whom we're able to write off as not directly benefiting us (even though the very lowest contributions to our society are still contributions to the society from which we all benefit).

• "Escalating black nationalist sentiments--the notion that America's will to racial justice is weak and therefore black people must close ranks for survival in a hostile country--rests principally upon claims to racial authenticity.... Black nationalist sentiments promote and encourage black cultural conservatism, especially black patriarchal (and homophobic) power. The idea of black people closing ranks against hostile white Americans reinforces black male power exercised over black women (e.g., to protect, regulate, subordinate, and hence usually, though not always, to use and abuse women) in order to preserve black social order under circumstances of white literal attack and symbolic assault" (24).
• "What is black authenticity? Who is really black? ... In short, blackness is a political and ethical construct" (25-26).
• "Unfortunately, most black leaders remained caught in a framework of racial reasoning--even when they opposed [Clarence] Thomas and/or supported [Anita] Hill.... The debate evolved around glib formulations of a black 'role model' based on mere pigmentation" (31).

That, as I see it, is one of the problems with some of the current discussions about Barack Obama. The consequences of such reasoning are chillingly depicted in Toni Morrison's incredible work Paradise, about an all-Black community, reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston's Eatonville, that ends up demonstrating the same kind of racial reasoning - excluding all who are or associate with those who are not the darkest shade of Black - against which they originally sought to defend themselves, with disastrous results. Hurston, incidentally, writing in the early twentieth century, was a segregationist herself - she's been demonized for it - because she too fell into that trap.

• "In [Glenn Loury's] book, Free at Last, he ... holds that black liberals adhere to a victim-status conception of black people that results in blaming all personal failings of black people on white racism.... Loury argues that black liberals truncate intellectual discourse regarding the plight of poor black people by censoring critical perspectives which air the 'dirty linen' of the black community.... Unfortunately, and ironically, Loury deploys the very rhetorical strategies he denounces in his liberal adversaries. For example, he casts black conservatives and neo-conservatives like himself as victims--victims whose own failings to gain a fair hearing and broad following in Afro-America he attributes to a black liberal conspiracy to discredit them in an ad hominem manner. Yet surely the black community is not so gullible, manipulable, and downright callous. It may simply be that the real merits of the case put forward by the new black conservatives are unconvincing and unpersuasive" (50-51).

That reminds me both of conservatives' criticism of the university, which fits exactly the same description, and of White men's cries of reverse racism and sexism, which are given as much credence as they deserve when the evidence still points in completely the opposite direction. On affirmative action, then:

• "Mobility by means of affirmative action breeds tenuous self-respect and questionable peer acceptance for middle-class blacks. The new black conservatives voiced these feelings in the forms of attacks on affirmative action programs (despite the fact that they had achieved their positions by means of such programs).... The need of black conservatives to gain the respect of their white peers deeply shapes certain elements of their conservatism. In this regard, they simply want what most people want, to be judged by the quality of their skills, not the color of their skin. But the black conservatives overlook the fact that affirmative action policies were political responses to the pervasive refusal of most white Americans to judge black America on that basis. The new black conservatives assume that without affirmative action programs, white Americans will make choices on merit rather than on race. Yet they have adduced no evidence for this" (52).

That's the same problem with arguments for voluntary charity rather than tax-funded government assistance programs, as I've discussed before (see my first comment below my article). Here's West's take on that subject:

• "We indeed must criticize and condemn immoral acts of black people, but we must do so cognizant of the circumstances into which people are born and under which they live.... The ideological blinders of the new black conservatives are clearly evident in their attempt to link the moral breakdown of poor black communities to the expansion of the welfare state.... The new black conservatives claim that transfer payments to the black needy engender a mentality of dependence which undercuts the value of self-reliance and of the solidity of the black poor family. They fail to see that the welfare state was an historic compromise between progressive forces seeking broad subsistence rights and conservative forces arguing for unregulated markets. Therefore it should come as no surprise that the welfare state possesses many flaws.... But simply to point out these rather obvious shortcomings does not justify cutbacks in the welfare state [which] will only produce even more black cultural disorientation and more devastated black households" (57).

• "With the added competition for jobs resulting from the entrance of new immigrants and white women into the labor market, semi-skilled and unskilled black workers have found it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to find employment. By 1980, 15 percent of all black men between the ages of twenty-four and forty-six reported to the Census Bureau that they had earned nothing whatsoever the previous year. Often the only option for young blacks is military enlistment. (Indeed, the U.S. army is nearly one-third black.)" (54)

That was one objection to the visiting worker program that Congress recently considered as part of its attempt to address the illegal immigration issue. But that would only serve the big corporations that want an unlimited supply of cheap labor to use but not care for, while it would further lessen the work available to unskilled American citizens. Thus we return to affirmative action:

• "Progressives should view affirmative action as neither a major solution to poverty nor a sufficient means to equality. We should see it as primarily playing a negative role--namely, to ensure that discriminatory practices against women and people of color are abated. Given the history of this country, it is a virtual certainty that without affirmative action racial and sexual discrimination would return with a vengeance" (64).

Indeed, there is plenty of evidence today - take the recent SCOTUS decision in the case in which the woman sought redress for decades of pay discrimination - that it persists nonetheless. As West concludes:</p>

• Although many of my liberal and progressive citizens view affirmative action as a redistributive measure whose time is over and whose life is no longer worth preserving, I question their view because of the persistence of discriminatory practices that increase black social misery, and the warranted suspicion that good will and fair judgment among the powerful does not loom as large toward women and people of color" (65).

*"More and more white Americans are willing to interact sexually with black Americans on an equal basis - even if the myths still persist. I view this as neither cause for celebration nor reason for lament," West explains. "Anytime two human beings find genuine pleasure, joy, and love, the stars smile and the universe is enriched. Yet as long as that pleasure, joy, and love is still predicated on myths of black sexuality, the more fundamental challenge of humane interaction remains unmet" (85).

"Black sexuality," West explains further, "is a taboo subject in America principally because it is a form of black power over which whites have little control--yet its visible manifestations evoke the most visceral of white responses, be it one of seductive obsession or downright disgust. On the one hand, black sexuality among blacks simply does not include whites, nor does it make them a central point of reference.... This can be uncomfortable for white people accustomed to being the custodians of power" (87). That reminds me of a story told me by a friend and former colleague of mine who presented a paper at last year's National Women's Studies Association conference (my own posting about part of which I'm sad to admit is still a work in progress). Before the panel began, a White woman came into the room, asking in a deep Southern accent whether this was the panel about Black people having sex. After my friend's presentation (on the work of Zane), this woman asked what was so special about a Black world in which Whites do not figure? After all, she said, Whites often write about the world as though Blacks don't figure in it. Heheh.

"On the other hand," West continues, "black sexuality between blacks and whites proceeds based on underground desires that Americans deny or ignore in public and over which laws have no effective control. In fact, the dominant sexual myths of black women and men portray whites as being 'out of control'--seduced, tempted, overcome, overpowered by black bodies. This form of black sexuality makes white passivity the norm--[again] hardly an acceptable self-image for a white-run society.... Yet there is a 'brazen' side--a side perceived long ago by black people. If black sexuality is a form of black power in which black agency and white passivity are interlinked, then are not black people simply acting out the very roles to which the racist myths of black sexuality confine them?" (87) This question brings to light the nature of "this Catch-22 situation in which black sexuality either liberates black people from white control in order to imprison them in racist myths or confines blacks to white 'respectability'" - like in the rejection of affirmative action in favor of White respect, as above - "while they make their own sexuality a taboo subject" (88).

This "Catch-22 situation" manifests itself via hip hop culture in that "for most young black men, power is acquired by stylizing their bodies over space and time in such a way that their bodies reflect their uniqueness and provoke fear in others.... This young black male style is a form of self-idenitifcation and resistance in a hostile culture; it is also an instance of machismo identity ready for violent encounters. Yet in a patriarchal society, machismo identity is expected and even exalted.... In this way, the black male search for power often reinforces the myth of black male sexual prowess--a myth that tends to subordinate black and white women as objects of sexual pleasure. This search for power also usually results in a direct confrontation with the order-imposing authorities of the status quo, that is, the police or criminal justice system." That, in a nutshell, West indicates, is "the prevailing cultural crisis of many black men" (89).

I recently finished an unabridged audio version of Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, wonderfully read by Aasif Mandvi, which was my second Rushdie book. Between it and my first, Midnight's Children, I'm getting a sense of Rushdie's style: chronologically fluid, satirical, politically aware, epic, occasionally fantastical. Both books follow fictional characters through lives positioned, like Forrest Gump's, in places such as the former Bombay, Kashmir, and Los Angeles at significant moments in recent history. In Shalimar, that includes the German occupation of France during WWII, the Rodney King fiasco(s), various acts of extremist Islamic terrorism, and the destruction of the tolerant people and the beautiful land of Kashmir at the hands of India, Pakistan, and those terrorists. There are many far more in-depth reviews of his book available online - most of them somewhat critical of the book, which perspective I don't share. For my part, about the whole book, I will simply say that I loved it. I also love Rushdie's style, which reading two of his books has helped me better understand, and I will read more of his work as soon as I can. (I met him once, but that's a story for another time.)

My particular purpose in this post is to discuss my feminist perspective on certain aspects of the book. There is a moment in Shalimar in which the title character's mother, Firdaus Noman, blames herself for her son's anger, which begins when he learns that his wife has cuckolded him - although it should be noted that he had very early indicated to his beautiful Hindu future wife, Bhoomi/Boonyi Kaul, that he would be violent if he ever had reason to be jealous - and results in his murder, first as a terrorist and then as a vengeful husband, of countless victims across the globe. (By the way, I'm not giving anything away that you can't learn in either the most standard online review or the first few chapters.) Firdaus, however, tells herself, on recognizing her son's anger, that she would never be quarrelsome again. Yet another of her sons, Anees Noman, is essentially a hero in a brief but incredibly emotional part of this book - and even without that it's clear that what becomes of Shalimar (nee Noman Sher Noman) has little to do with his mother.

Rushdie demonstrates his awareness - and, I think, his disapproval - of the world's mother- and woman-blaming tendencies in this way in this book. Of course the adulterous Boonyi - and the consistently adulterous Max Ophuls (who, interestingly enough, shares his name with a real person) - deserve blame for their dishonesty in those choices in this book. But the magnitude of events for which she is blamed - and, ultimately, punished - is way out of scope in terms of her error.

However, stepmother-demonization is also very present at times in this book, and Rushdie does not do anything that would cause or allow readers to question that. Max's wife, Margaret "Peggy/The Grey Rat" Rhodes, we learn, is (and always has been) frigid and barren - and also understandably bitter over her husband's incessant philandering. Impelled to some extent by a prophetic (and thus self-fulfilling) dream, Peggy connives to compel Boonyi into giving up her daughter, whom Peggy takes to America to raise by herself. When the inevitable questions arise, she lies to her "adopted" daughter as much as she can about the child's own origins, thus keeping her from her birth mother and almost entirely from her (thus beloved) father. Perhaps to some extent driven by those questions, Peggy ultimately becomes disinterested in the child, who as a teenager acts out in almost every imaginable way. It is only after Max's murder, when the daughter, India Rhodes (later Ophuls, nee Kashmira Noman) has already learned of her birth mother's identity, that Peggy tells her daughter a little of the truth - and provides a photo of Boonyi during her brief period of obesity. It is the only photo of her natural mother that India ever sees. The portrait of the stereotypical stepmother/single mother/nontraditional mother - from the barrenness and frigidity to the conniving, hateful, controlling, lying, unloving behavior related to "her" child, all of which is usually used to indicate unwomanliness and unfemininity - is unmistakable and disappointing.

By chance, the next long audiobook that I'm "reading" - and also vastly enjoying! - is Zadie Smith's On Beauty. I think that I read part of her White Teeth before, but I don't remember whether I ever finished it. Both Shalimar and Beauty feature interracial and adulterous relationships and are set both in and outside of the U.S. The days of "outsiders" not understanding the States are over: You'd never know that Smith and Rushdie weren't American citizens by the way that they seem to "get" the nuances of our culture. Rushdie has, of course, lived in the States, but Smith, it seems, hasn't. Beauty is not postmodernist, like Rushdie's work, though; for instance, so far it's proceeded in chronological order. Intriguingly, it does seem to be a modern take on the themes of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which my mom and I saw, starring Kathleen Turner, in London last May. Academia, relationships, disappointment - it's all there.

There's a mother-son moment in the play, too: As I noted in my blog after first seeing it last summer, in Virginia Woolf, the wife expresses her awareness of the controlling mother/screwed up son ideology, even though neither is actually relevant to the woman's life, since she doesn't actually have a son. I'm only maybe a third of the way into Smith's book, but I've already found a mother-son moment here too: one of the main characters, Kiki Belsey, congratulates herself for producing "a young black man of intelligence and sensibility" - although she was then "mildly annoyed" to find that hers was not the only young Black man at the free Mozart concert (pt.1 ch.7). Smith goes on:

Undeterred, Kiki continues her imaginary speech to the imaginary Guild of Black American Mothers: And there's no big secret, not at all. You just need to have faith, I guess. And you need to counter the dismal self-image that Black men receive as their birthright from America - that's essential. And I don't know, get involved in after-school activities, have books around the house, and sure, have a little money, and a house with outdoor--

Despite the Belsey family's determined liberalism, they are not, as you can see, free from unfortunate biases. They are most of them a little racist toward Black people darker than the half-White Belsey children. Kiki is clearly a little classist. Jerome, the boy of whom Kiki was feeling so proud above, seems to take his mother's side when his father neglects her, but her daughter Zora blames Kiki for Howard Belsey's affair more than Zora blames Howard himself, citing Kiki's weight and non-intellectualism - and thus turning off a smart, handsome, talented young Black man who otherwise might have been interested in her. It's an interesting family portrait so far.

Incidentally, I'm apparently not the first to notice the connections between Shalimar and Beauty. Barnes & Noble Online lists On Beauty as the book most frequently purchased by those buying Shalimar the Clown.